Global Landslide Catalog (update 2019)

Landslides occur when an environmental trigger like an extreme rain event, often a severe storm or hurricane, and gravity's downward pull sets soil and rock in motion. Conditions beneath the surface are often unstable already, so the heavy rains act as the last straw that causes mud, rocks, or debris- or all combined- to move rapidly down mountains and hillsides. Unfortunately, people and property are often swept up in these unexpected mass movements. Landslides can also be caused by earthquakes, surface freezing and thawing, ice melt, the collapse of groundwater reservoirs, volcanic eruptions, and erosion at the base of a slope from the flow of river or ocean water. But torrential rains most commonly activate landslides.

The Global Landslide Catalog (GLC) was developed with the goal of identifying rainfall-triggered landslide events around the world, regardless of size, impact, or location. The GLC considers all types of mass movements triggered by rainfall, which have been reported in the media, disaster databases, scientific reports, or other sources. The GLC has been compiled since 2007 at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and contains over 11,000 reports and growing. A new project called the Community the Cooperative Open Online Landslide Repository, or COOLR, provides the opportunity for the community to view landslide reports and contribute their own. The goal of the COOLR project is to create the largest global public online landslide catalog available and open to for anyone everyone to share, download, and analyze landslide information.

This visualization shows the locations of landslides during the period 2007-2019 (as of 03.11.19), as reported in the GLC. In this version all landslide locations have the same visual treatment without pointing out which ones had fatalities. It has been developed for kids and educational purposes.

More information on this system is available at: https://landslides.nasa.gov

The Global Landslide Catalog is currently available here: https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/global-landslide-catalog-export

See the following sources:

• https://pmm.nasa.gov/landslides/index.html
• NASA's Precipitation Measurement Missions